Electronic mail, or email, has rapidly become one of the most ubiquitous forms of communication in the office and business world, and is also rapidly becoming the same in the home and private spheres. Because of the popularity of email as a communication medium, more and more mobile devices, such as pagers, Personal Digital Assistants (“PDAs”), cell-phones and other appliances are beginning to provide email capability. Most mobile devices can receive and display text messages, and the more sophisticated devices can acknowledge, compose, and send email messages.
Email provides a quick and convenient way for computer users to communicate. This communication is initiated by a message sender who composes the message using a text editing program, provides the email address of the intended recipient, and often provides an indication of the content (subject matter) of the message by providing text in a “subject” field. Using well-understood technology this composed message is then sent to the recipient's computer address. The recipient's computer receives the message and stores it in the recipient's inbox. The recipient eventually reads, deletes, responds to, or otherwise processes the message stored within the inbox by using any of a number of email programs well known in the art.
The header portion of an email message contains fields composed of character strings comprising a field-name followed by a colon, followed by a field-body terminated by a carriage return/line feed. An example of a header field is:
“To: John Doe<CR><LF>”.
In this example, the <CR> represents the ASCII carriage return character and the <LF> represents the ASCII line feed character. The header field-names are not case sensitive, thus, “to:” is equivalent to “TO:” or “tO:”. The contents of these headers are specified by the entity that composes the message.
The “To:” field-body contains the addresses of the primary recipients of the message where the address of each recipient is separated by a comma or a semicolon. Recipients include both humans and programs. The “Subject:” field-body often provides a summary or indicates the nature of the message and sometimes contains a specialized command string that is to be recognized by the recipient. Although, these fields are all initialized by the sender, the recipient fields are generally limited to actual Internet addresses. On the other hand, the subject field has no specific meaning and may, in fact, be blank, contain a specialized command string, or contain a random arrangement of characters. Additional “cc:” and “bcc:” field bodies are optional means for sending declared and undeclared (‘blind’) copies of the message to one recipient or groups of recipients.
A sender can address a single message to many recipients by separating the addresses of the recipients with a comma or a semicolon. Each of these recipients may respond to the original message by sending a reply message to the same list of recipients (plus the original sender). Some of these recipients may then respond to the first reply message. These reply messages are termed follow-up messages to the original message. This process facilitates a vigorous discussion between the original sender and the recipients, as well as between the recipients.
Today's business world is data-intensive, and databases are constructed to arrange, save, and retrieve the generated data. A database system is a collection of information organized in such a way that data may be accessed quickly. Database applications are present in everyday use including automated teller machines, flight reservation systems, and internet-account systems of all types. A database management system (DBMS) is a collection of programs that allow the entry, modification, and selection of data in a database. There are various types of DBMSs, ranging from small systems that run on personal computers to larger systems that run on mainframe systems.
Requests for information from a database are made by a database server using a query language. Different DBMSs support different query languages, including a standardized language called “structured query language” (SQL), for example. Database servers that use SQL are often referred to as “SQL servers.” However, one detraction of SQL and other query languages is that they are not simple. Also, it may take up to a week for an experienced programmer to write a report to extract desired data. And the program itself is fairly costly.
There is not a simple method to disseminate the data from a database to a selected list of people. Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.